‘We’d all really been through it, but it was lovely to be back together again’
Two decades since Bridget Jones’s Diary, Abi Jackson chats to comedy star Sally Phillips
Sally Phillips is currently in Australia, filming comedy-drama How To Please A Woman. It’s sunny, the beach is nearby, and lockdown restrictions are a distant memory.
There was a price to pay though. Two weeks cooped up in a hotel room, doing the required quarantine with two of her three sons, Olly, 17, and Tom, 10.
“We’ll see who comes out alive!” Phillips jokes when we chat over Zoom, shortly before she set off from London in April. Thankfully, Phillips’ Instagram confirms they all survived the fortnight intact.
It’s a funny twist though, considering hotels are one of the things many of us have really missed this past year. Hotels are also part of the reason for this interview – Phillips has teamed up with streaming service NOW to mark the recent 20th anniversary of Bridget Jones’s Diary, offering fans the chance to win a hotel minibreak just like the one Bridget and Daniel Cleaver had in the movie.
“That’s the iconic scene from the first film, Bridget and Daniel’s mini-break in Stoke Park Hotel in Buckinghamshire,” says Phillips, who played Bridget’s foulmouthed best friend Shazza in the hit 2001 movie and sequels. “Now have made it really easy, they’ve given you the same suite in the hotel, the drive in the open top Mercedes, complementary chardonnay, unlimited ice-cream, and enormous pants!”
Despite “clawing slowly towards the end of lockdown” when we chat, the comedy star – who got involved with The Oxford Revue comedy club while studying Italian and linguistics, later racking up shows at Edinburgh Fringe and becoming a household name with the likes of Smack The Pony and I’m Alan Partridge – is full of wit.
There’s reflection and gratitude too. “Weirdly, I can believe it’s been 20 years,” she says, when asked if it’s hard to comprehend how long it’s been since Bridget Jones first hit cinemas. “Because I feel like I’m, well, not really a different person, but I feel like so much life has happened. When we went back to do the third one [2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby], we were all just a bit more ragged, you know?
“There’d been huge things: people had won Oscars, got married and divorced, and remarried, people had died and fought cancer. We’d all really been through it, but it was just absolutely lovely to be back together again.
“That is the really good thing about getting older. You’ve got the longer history with your friends, so more of a shorthand.”
And with age, comes perspective, finds Phillips. “There is so much pressure on us, particularly women, to be the best we can be. I also think we need to give ourselves permission to just not be concerned with any of that – not to be the best we can be, or the worst we can be, but just be.
“We’re just never good enough, we need to be learning Mandarin and doing jiu jitsu and volunteering and doing all these things all the time, it’s exhausting. I think we need to kick back against it a bit, because it’s another way of us being controlled.”
● For more details, see bridgetminibreak.nowtv.com